By Dr. Stephane Mbiankeu Nguea
Energy investments in Central Africa must deliver more than electricity; they should also create jobs, build local industries, and strengthen economic resilience. Embedding local content policies into energy projects can increase workforce participation, support domestic businesses, and ensure that the region captures greater long-term value from its natural resources. By prioritizing skills development, local procurement, and inclusive partnerships, governments can transform energy investments into engines of sustainable and inclusive growth.
Introduction
Central Africa is awash with energy projects. Hydroelectric dams, gas-fired power plants, solar parks and regional interconnections multiply in inauguration speeches and national master plans, carried by public financing, bilateral partnerships and, more recently, blended finance instruments. Yet, once the turbines are installed and the transmission lines strung, an elementary question almost always remains without a convincing answer: how many women and men of the region have, thanks to these works, found stable, skilled and sustainable employment beyond the temporary construction phase? Empirical observation, whether of the Memve’ele dam in Cameroon, the floating thermal power plants installed in emergency in the DRC or the rural electrification projects scattered across Chad, suggests that the record is desperately thin. The question is not whether energy is indispensable to industrialisation and job creation—it undoubtedly is—but rather why the billions of dollars poured into energy infrastructure in Central Africa produce so few structural direct and indirect jobs, and, above all, what states could do differently right now.
Why Energy Fails to Create Jobs
The first fundamental explanation lies in the dissociation between energy investment and industrial development. Large projects are conceived by ministries of Energy that seek above all to fill a deficit in installed capacity and to balance a financial equation between debt, subsidy and tariff revenue. The ministries of Industry, Employment and Vocational Training are rarely associated in the design of tender specifications, so that local content clauses, when they exist, are limited to vague obligations of national preference for unskilled labour during civil engineering works. Once the construction site is finished, the power plant operates with a handful of foreign or expatriate technicians, and the electricity produced powers an unchanged economic fabric, made up of small informal units and a few large extractive companies that would have produced their own energy anyway. The link that would transform an injection of electrical power into an expansion of productive employment—namely the emergence of new manufacturing companies, agro-food processing centres or energy-intensive digital services—does not materialise spontaneously. As a report by the African Development Bank on Central African industrialisation highlights, the absence of explicit strategies linking energy to identified industrial corridors is one of the main reasons why infrastructure investment does not translate into productive diversification.
The second explanation is the deficit of local technical skills, which is by no means inevitable but results from chronic under-investment in technical education and vocational training for energy trades. Energy projects require certified welders, industrial electricians, automation maintenance technicians and engineers capable of managing smart grids. Yet, in most countries of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), the corresponding technical streams are either non-existent, under-equipped, or disconnected from the standards required by international contracting authorities. The successful bidders, whether Chinese, European or Turkish, then invoke the absence of qualified local labour to justify importing their own personnel, and the vicious circle perpetuates itself: energy projects do not create local jobs because the local workforce is not trained, and the local workforce is not trained because energy projects are not structured to finance its training. The literature on local content in extractive and infrastructure industries, notably the work of the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), shows that without a contractual training obligation accompanied by financial penalties and independent monitoring, promises of skills transfer remain a dead letter.
The third explanation is the fragmentation of national energy markets, which prevents the massification of demand and thus the emergence of a regional value chain for energy manufacturing and services. Each country plans its investments in isolation, without regional coordination of technical standards, tariff policies or commissioning schedules. The result is that even relatively simple equipment—transformers, cables, poles, meters—is massively imported from Asia or Europe, whereas regional production, even modest, would have considerable spin-offs in terms of industrial employment. The Central Africa Power Pool (CAPP) initiative, although useful for harmonising cross-border exchanges, has not yet led to a common industrial policy for equipment manufacturing, and interconnection projects remain too slow to materialise. The 2022 report of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) stresses that regional value chains in solar and wind energy are embryonic in Central Africa, precisely because national orders are too dispersed to justify private investment in production units.
Policy recommendations
Faced with these three blockages, the public policy responses must be both pragmatic and sequenced.
- Integrate into any call for tender for an energy project of more than 10 megawatts an enforceable local content clause that goes beyond a simple quota of unskilled labour during construction. This clause must include a training component, financed by a mandatory levy on the project budget (for example, 0.5% of the total cost), managed by a joint public-private fund and steered in liaison with national technical institutes. The obligation to certify the skills acquired, according to standards recognised by the profession, would progressively build up a pool of local technicians and engineers who could be mobilised on subsequent projects, thus reducing dependence on imported labour. The mechanism is not theoretical: the World Bank’s technical education scholarship programme in West Africa has shown that a contractual link between a large project and vocational training centres can significantly improve the transition of young graduates into formal employment.
- Create within ECCAS a regional coordination office for energy equipment demand, tasked with aggregating the needs of member states on a multi-year basis, standardising technical specifications and launching grouped calls for tender that are sufficiently large to attract regional or international manufacturers willing to set up local assembly units. Such mutualisation, already successfully trialled in the pharmaceutical sector in East Africa, would reduce unit costs, create a predictable regional market and generate manufacturing jobs around the energy hubs of Douala, Pointe-Noire or Kinshasa.
- Make technical education and vocational training a real budgetary priority, and not a government communication slogan. The ministries of Education and Vocational Training must be associated with national energy planning from the feasibility study phase, in order to identify future skills needs and orient curricula accordingly. The private sector, through chambers of commerce and professional associations, should be a stakeholder in the governance of training centres, with a say over programmes and certification. Without this continuum between the energy project, the training institution and the enterprise, megawatts will continue to be installed without young Central Africans perceiving the benefits in terms of career opportunities.
Conclusion
Central Africa does not merely need more energy; it needs the energy produced to effectively serve as a foundation for industrial development that creates jobs. This requires breaking with the narrow vision that makes the energy project an end in itself and restoring its place within a broader strategy of productive transformation. The instruments exist, successful experiences on the continent are documented, and demographic pressure makes inaction increasingly untenable. What remains is political will, that is, the decision to condition access to public energy markets on measurable results in terms of local employment and skills transfer. As long as this decision is not taken, the ribbons cut at the foot of dams will remain the symbol of a development that bypasses its youth.
